How exciting! A Guest Mom is here this week. The beautiful Katherine Center. Red hair. Talented writer. (Is there a connection?)

Here are the impressive nuts and bolts on Ms. Center:Katherine Center graduated from Vassar College, where she won the Vassar College Fiction Prize, and the University of Houston, where she received the Delores Welder Mitchell fellowship and earned an MA in fiction. Her first novel, The Bright Side of Disaster, has been featured in People Magazine, USA Today, Vanity Fair, the Houston Chronicle, and the Dallas Morning News. BookPage named her one of seven new writers to watch, and she just had an essay published in Real Simple. Her second novel is due out next summer. She lives with her husband and two young children in Houston.

And here, from the about page on her website, is what you really want to know:Katherine Pannill Center started writing fiction when she was in sixth grade, when she and her two best friends filled countless spirals with stories about meeting Duran Duran at the mall and bewitching the band members into falling in love with them. These stories involved kissing, weeping, limos, the occasional log cabin, and many gentle blankets of snow.

And now, if you’ve read this post so far, you and I know exactly the same amount about Katherine Center. Except this: Katherine’s talents came to my attention by way of Girl con Queso. And basically, anything GcQ recommends is gold. So I already know that I like Katherine Center. A lot.

Because Katherine is a writer, and because she thinks about and evaluates writing during many of her waking moments, she is going to recommend some of her favorite children’s books to us. She’s not just going to tell us she likes them. She’s going to tell us why she likes the. As a writer. Personally, I can’t wait to see her picks.